While Thornton had agreed to Dr. Wilder’s plan to transfer, he wished his father would just give him half the money about to be invested in the year at Yale and let him “take a year of strenuous quill-driving about Washington Square, talking til fifty-o’clock in the morning with the young blood of American literature, instead of the corrected and sandpaper etc. etc. from the prep. schools.”34 Besides, he had an offer to join the Cincinnati Little Theater Repertory Company, which was, he said, the practical experience he needed “to almost finish me off as dramatist, but the family won’t hear of it.”35
While he waited for the Yale semester to begin, Thornton lived at home in Mount Carmel and took typing and shorthand classes three times weekly at a local business college—skills that would, in his father’s opinion, prepare him for certain military jobs (“the 7th clerk of a sub-quarter master,” Thornton joked).36 They would prove to be invaluable skills for a writer as well. Thornton still wrestled with his conscience about whether he should leave college for military service. Once again his brother was the recipient of Thornton’s innermost thoughts:
My only feeling about not being in the war myself is: the audacity of it! There is no earthly reason why I should not be there except I cannot bring myself to be vengeful and slaughter-breathing and helmet-proud about it for more than 24 hours at a time. Then I slip back into my native, bee-like preoccupation with the rarities and tender uniques of art and letters and let the trumpeting die away down the end of the street.37
ON SEPTEMBER 25, 1917, Thornton spent his first night in 414 Berkeley Hall, his dormitory room at Yale, waiting for Yale to assign him a roommate. He turned out to be a freshman who filled their room so full of tobacco smoke that it made Thornton sick. That first night he went to see the great Sarah Bernhardt perform, and then wrote a letter to Professor Wager at Oberlin. Thornton was “happy and expectant,” he told Dr. Wager, but his family “was troubled” because the Yale entrance board had reviewed his academic record and decided to admit him as a sophomore rather than a junior. He hoped—to no avail—that the dean, a Yale classmate of his father’s, could successfully intercede and allow him to enter the junior class. Once again Thornton was a sophomore, and he would spend three years completing degree requirements at Yale.38 His Yale expenses were almost certainly paid in part by the “Sons of ’84” fund established in 1891 by his father’s Yale class of 1884 to “aid in the payment of tuition bills in Yale College of sons of members of the class.”39
Isabel had been sent off, over her protest, to Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts. She was so unhappy about it that Isabella, Janet in tow, rented quarters near Northfield for several months to help Isabel adjust to boarding school.40 Dr. Wilder’s chess pieces did not always move willingly, and sometimes his wife did her best to check them—but ultimately, everyone moved as he ordained. He wrote to Amos about his satisfaction that Thornton was enrolled at Yale, and about his hopes for the boy. He had watched as Thornton wrote a play in ten minutes. “(I quietly observed him)—writing just as rapidly as he could; no changes; that seems to me tremendous.” He believed that Thornton “certainly has genius.” He hoped that the competition at Yale “with many bright youths” would “comb him out a little,” however, and give him “a little more modesty as to his gifts.” Dr. Wilder was concerned that Thornton
lacks the power to tie down to anything he don’t relish; and so is barred from high achievements, I fear; and yet genius has laws of its own. I could do much for him by way of suggestion of things to do as foundations,—the great books etc.; but it is not his way and I must accept it. His mother encourages his conceit I fear.
But Dr. Wilder was confident that Yale would “reduce him some.” Meantime, he said, Thornton was “in good humor; washes dishes; does things about the house; after much pushing and withal I am thankful for such a son.”41
“I LIKE Yale more everyday,” Thornton wrote to Amos that fall. He especially enjoyed the campus in the evening, “A silvery autumn dusk in the campus quadrangle is a stirring thing,” he wrote.42 Amos’s reputation was “no less reverenced here than at Oberlin,” Thornton told his brother, because of the “combination of high Athleticism and a sober, even grave personality.” However, Thornton was a little disappointed in his professors, he confided.43 He carried a hefty academic load during his first semester as he tried to catch up with his Yale classmates: courses in philosophy, history, anthropology, geology, and literature, especially the works of Shakespeare and Milton. He also studied Latin with emphasis on the works of Horace, Tacitus, and Catullus.
He kept up his typing and shorthand classes three days a week—“a sample of what I am preparing to do for my country in her extremities, as my father wishes me to look upon it,” he wrote to Dr. Wager.
You won’t believe me when I say that I had a terribly strong fit of militarism the last few days to go into the R. O. T. C., and my mother seemed to be inclining toward it for the ignoble reason I suspect of going down the street with a medium tall son in brown—it is a ravishing experience I can perfectly see—but Father repeated that my aptitudes were not along the lines of Alexander the Great and that for the present this preparation for a quartermastership was my quota.44
The war in Europe dominated campus life at Yale, as it had at Oberlin, with many college men enlisting in one form of service or another, and those staying behind joining ROTC, drilling and learning to march on a campus that had been transformed into a military training ground. Prospective cavalrymen who could not ride learned to mount and dismount on wooden horses shipped out to military training stations by the War Department. In the Yale Literary Magazine, Thornton could read war poetry and essays written by Yale men such as Stephen Vincent Benét, another avid writer, a talented poet, and an outstanding member of the class of 1919.
For the time being, Thornton concentrated on his classes and made a strong first impression on at least one of his Yale professors, sharing the news in a letter to Dr. Wager: He was “being spoiled,” he said, by the praise his Milton professor, Lawrence Mason, was writing in the margins of his papers: “Thank Heaven there is someone in the class that can illustrate their points as a cultivated Gentleman should,” read one comment. “This is a triumph of critical wit and dexterity,” ran another. “You have phrased this perfectly; the thing could be painted.” There was the occasional caution about abusing metaphors, but his professor gave one of Thornton’s papers the first “four plus” he had ever given.45
Lest he grow too cocky, Thornton was kept in line by letters from Nina Trego, who had received her Oberlin degree and was now working in Chicago at Marshall Field’s department store. He reported to Dr. Wager that he had sent a recent manuscript to Nina, who pronounced it the worst thing he had ever written.
THORNTON FLUNKED three courses in his first two years at Yale—Latin, geology, and biology—but he quickly made a name for himself in other arenas. His friend Wilmarth Sheldon “Lefty” Lewis, who knew him first at Thacher and then at Yale, recalled years later that Thornton “became a character, and I think perhaps for the first time realized how much people liked him.”46 Lewis had served as an editor of the Lit, Yale’s literary magazine, and by 1919, Thornton was also one of the “Powerful Pens” at the helm of the journal, the oldest such student magazine and literary journal in the United States.47
Early in his first year at Yale, Thornton met Stephen Vincent Benét, whose older brother, the author William Rose Benét, was also a Yale man, class of 1907. With his brother’s help, Steve Benét’s first book of poems, Five Men and Pompeii: A Series of Dramatic Portraits, had been published in 1915, when he was eighteen. At Yale he poured his energy into working on the Record, one of the college newspapers, and serving on the editorial board of the Lit. He was elected chairman of the magazine in April 1918. All the while Benét was writing and publishing poetry and fiction.
Thornton met Steve Benét at a Record meeting early in the semester, and found him a “perfectly unromantic looking person, although
not commonplace. His hair is short and light and curly. His face is round and quizzical and snubbed and his eyes are mole’s eyes. He rocks his shoulders from side to side while talking.”48 Thornton wrote to Dr. Wager that Steve Benét was “the whole power” of the Lit.49 Benét invited Thornton to bring some plays and fiction to his room on the evening of October 4, to be considered for publication in the Lit, and “devoted himself” to Thornton’s “smudgy typewritten sheets” without any regard for the author, Thornton wrote. They read The Angel on the Ship and Solus inter Deos Potens and then Benét “said some very nice things” and escorted Thornton out of the room and all the way down the hall.50 “So. I’ve got a story—(-play I mean-)—on the first table of contents of the Yale Lit.,” Thornton reported to Dr. Wager on October 16. He was also “being lured into a studio conversazione on Sunday evenings by Benét and Co. But too much tobacco smoke chokes me and the beer has no illusions—. . . . The playlet is the Angel on the Ship.”51 It appeared in the October 1917 issue of the Yale Literary Magazine, a brief but intriguing critique of organized religion.
To Thornton’s pleasure, the Yale University Dramatic Association, in its quest to promote plays written by undergraduate authors, sponsored the performance of two Wilder one-acts on December 20, 1917, along with two other student plays. Printed invitations went out to students and faculty alike, and Yale president Arthur Twining Hadley and his wife were in the audience to see, among other student offerings, Thornton’s That Other Fanny Otcutt and The Message and Jehanne, two of his three-minute playlets. Benét and company would publish several Wilder playlets in the Lit, and Thornton contributed essays to the magazine as well.52 The December 1918 issue carried In Praise of Guynemer, his dramatic tribute to the French flying ace, born in 1894, and the victor in fifty-three missions during World War I. Georges Guynemer died in flight on September 11, 1917, and in 1918 the Yale University Press published a translation of Henry Bordeaux’s biography, Georges Guynemer: Knight of the Air, with an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt. “Measure for Measure,” a sonnet by Thornton, made it into the November 1917 issue of the Lit but is nevertheless proof that while he was already turning out promising plays, short stories, and essays, he was clearly not destined to become a poet.53
NOW THAT he lived in New Haven, near his parents, Thornton was freed of the weekly duty of writing letters home. (He was living almost too close to his father, who, from his Yale-in-China office, could keep uncomfortably close watch over his son’s daily life.) Thornton wrote long letters to Amos, who was based in Bistrika (now Bistrica) on the Serbian front in the summer and early fall of 1917, still attached to the American Field Service. Amos was so ill with malaria in October 1917 that he had to be treated in a French hospital. He would resign from the American Field Service in Paris in November and enlist as a U.S. Army private, assigned to the Field Artillery Training School in Valdahon, France, near the Swiss border.
Thornton also corresponded with Charlotte, who was happily occupied with her studies, scientific experiments, and writing at Mount Holyoke. Released from the expectation of letters written home on Sunday afternoons, Thornton turned instead to writing long letters to Dr. Wager, who still held his loyal allegiance as the best teacher he had ever known. From Oberlin, Dr. Wager wrote to his former pupil, “I haven’t said how I miss you and sigh for you and talk of you to all comers; nor how wise I think you were to leave us.”54
During his first year at Yale, Thornton was invited to join the Elizabethan Club, founded in 1896. Located in a historic colonial home on College Street, the club had a library stocked with first editions of Shakespeare—quartos and folios—and the works of Milton and others. On the walls of the house hung paintings and engravings—images of Erasmus, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson.55 This was a congenial place where faculty and students could gather for tea, tomato sandwiches, conversation, and intellectual exchange. Membership was offered only after nomination and election by existing members of the club, and Thornton’s membership was no doubt encouraged by William Lyon Phelps, a longtime Niven family friend, who had been the club’s president as well as chairman of its Board of Governors.
In December, Thornton wrote a minuscule playlet on a postcard, titling it Dialogue in the Elizabethan Club and mailing it to Dr. Wager. In this vignette Thornton is asked if he came from a college out west. “Yes, Oberlin, Ohio,” he answers. The distinguished Yale professor of English, Chauncey Brewster Tinker, observes that Oberlin is where “the great Mr. Wager is.” Thornton responds: “Yes, do you know him?” “No,” Professor Tinker replies. “But his pupils come around praising him.” Thornton tries to find words and “strains the language for eulogy and at last ends impotently, but impulsively . . . I should never have left.” Professor Tinker “throws back his head with a kind of snort.” Thornton wrote to Professor Wager, “By the great rivers, classical and Christian, I swear that every word of this is true. I have made myself to appear rude for you!”56
But he was finding himself at Yale, and basking in the stimulating company of his new friends. In fact, his mother reported to Amos, Thornton had been neglecting his courses and had to spend time in the Yale infirmary because he was so exhausted “by late hours talking with fellow students.” He was “relishing the companionships almost too excitedly and almost at the expense of both his health and his studies.”57 Yet he found time to write his playlets, as well as to work on fiction and essays. One three-minute playlet to undergo several revisions and a transformation of title was The Walled City, which Steve Benét published during Thornton’s second semester at Yale. “Every soul dwells in its walled city,” one of the characters says.
Eventually, some years after it was published in the Yale Lit, Thornton deleted that line, and changed the title to Nascuntur Poetae . . . The ellipses evoke the entire Latin saying to which Thornton referred: “Poets are born, but orators are made.” In all its versions, this short play examines the life of the artist—the “chosen”—and the blessing of the artistic gifts, as well as the risks. “I am not afraid of life. I will astonish it,” the gifted boy—the poet—says. “God’s gifts are not easily borne; he who carries much gold stumbles, and is burdened,” he is told by the Woman in the Chlamys in the early, unpublished version of the play. “I bring the dark and necessary gifts.” When she warns that he will know himself “isolated, solitary, unlovable,” the boy wants to relinquish the gifts. It is too late, she tells him, and he has no choice in the matter in any case.
The third character in the playlet, the Woman in Deep Red, asserts that his life is a journey and “has its destination.” Because artists are “chosen,” they are “breathed upon,” set apart and given the power to create in words or images or music. Artistic responsibility and power isolate the artist—but then, the Woman in the Chlamys says, every human being is isolated. “Every soul is a walled city and [no] other may enter save at dusk and in strange moods, nor may thy soul visit another’s save in rare and unknown hours.”58
When his play was published in the Lit at Yale in 1918, Thornton, then twenty-one, was a restless, frustrated, gifted college boy, virtually alone in his belief that he was born to write. Ahead of him lay struggle and success far beyond what even his ambitious imagination could conjure in those days at Yale. He was a writer eager to be about his life’s work, but temporarily required to be a college student and chafing at the bonds. Yale would indeed “reduce him some” as his father hoped, but it would also expand him, challenge him, urge him closer to his authentic voice.59
By the time The Walled City appeared in print ten years later, revised and renamed Nascuntur Poetae . . . , it reflected Thornton Wilder’s emerging view of the challenge and the mission of the writer: “The life of man awaits you, the light laughter and the same misery in the same day, in the selfsame hour the trivial and the divine,” one of the women tells the young poet prophetically, in words nowhere to be found in the earlier version at Yale. “You are to give it a voice. Among th
e bewildered and the stammering thousands you are to give it a voice and mark its meaning.”60
11
“HEROES”
The veneration will grow. His place is beside the heroes he mused upon.
—THORNTON WILDER,
In Praise of Guynemer
New Haven, Connecticut; Washington, D.C.;
Newport, Rhode Island (1918)
As he neared his twenty-first birthday, Thornton was idealistically given to hero worship. Foremost on his current roster of heroes were his brother, Amos, now a corporal in A Battery, 17th Field Artillery, 2nd Division, fighting at the front in Rupt Sector, southeast of Verdun; Charles Wager, the Oberlin professor he idolized; Georges Guynemer, the French flying ace he would eulogize; the actor John Barrymore; the producer and director Arthur Hopkins, and the latest in a long line of show business luminaries about whom he fantasized—the young Welsh actor Gareth Hughes.
“I am perpetually enthusiastic over some composition or book, some person or some friend,” Thornton wrote to his brother.1 He was “ ‘writing’ much,” he told a friend, “both for the waste-basket and for posterity which is only a temporary postponement of the waste-basket.”2 A good deal of his writing was directed toward his current living heroes—long letters of self-revelation to Amos and to Professor Wager, and plays conceived for Barrymore, Hopkins, and Hughes—although the latter three knew nothing of Thornton Wilder or his writing. Not only had Professor Wager led Thornton through classical literature, occasionally suggesting related ideas for plays Thornton might write, but he often tantalized his former student with accounts of his occasional trips to Detroit or Cleveland or New York to go to the theater. “I missed seeing Gareth Hughes in Cleveland,” Wager wrote, knowing of Thornton’s admiration for the young Welshman. “If I had, would have invited him to dinner and talked to him of you.” Wager had a friend who actually knew Hughes, and reported that he was “quite as engaging as he looks.”3